I Fought the Law and the Law Won

I once had a dream, when I was asleep in Idyllwild, that Jude Law was chasing me through a field of buffalo. The dream – let’s just call it a nightmare from here on out – was a bewildering one. Law was smiling, his lips curled like a winding mountain road, as he scooted through waves of massive bison en route to murdering me. Well, the dream never got that far, since I woke up shortly thereafter and started vomiting. I didn’t throw up because of the dream, mind you, but because I had food poisoning from eating at some hole-in-the-wall restaurant earlier in the day.

Anyway, I started thinking about the correlation between fever-induced nausea and Jude Law. How was it that my brain, slowly melting from the toxins in my body, conjured up, out of every possibility in the world, the dude from “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”. I asked a graduate student at Cal State Fullerton, who was about to get her masters in clinical psychology, what it all meant. “If we’re looking at this in a psychoanalytic way, this dream would make sense in the greater context of your life,” the student said. “You feel threatened by him.” Oh great. “It sounds like you were in mortal fear.” None of this makes me feel better.

Amused by the information that was amassed, I decided to ask another individual, this time in the field of research, what he thought of the London born actor. “Awesome when with mustache,” the digital collections librarian in Chicago said. Clearly everyone was scared of this actor. Who was this ladykiller, whose primary goal was to bind himself to posh clothing, all while globally terrorizing people? (citation not needed)

I looked back into his catalog of work only to find crap. I don’t say crap liberally, as “Alfie” was quite literally just that. Then again, how do I really slight a man who has won more than two MTV Best Kiss awards in his career? Maybe if I found the voice of a female, what I hear is his target audience, I would find the answers to which I was looking for. “He’s hot even though he’s balding,” said one Orange County resident.

I decided to stop asking the populous what they thought of Law and started my own personal quest of enlightenment. I found several things that I liked about him: He played Errol Flynn for three-minutes in The Aviator; Law played a sociopath in “Road to Perdition”; and he also played, at the height of his career, a character named “young man” in a movie that lacks a synopsis on Wikipedia.

Most importantly, Law gave the world the face of Dior, a male fragrance that smells like what “Gattaca” looks like. Law has also accrued industry praise for his performance in having sex with a bunch of people that resemble Gwyneth Paltrow from afar. There was also a scandal, sometime in the mid-2000s, that saw the famed performer do some terrible things that his wife could not forgive him for (starring in “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”).

No, through my immense research, I couldn’t figure out why he plagued my dreams that one evening in the mountains of California. I cant say that I dislike Law, but I do wish he starred in movies built for his talents – and for anyone interested in what those talents may be, feel free to rent “Shop”, which was brought to my attention by our good friend Trent S. Reid. Below are some roles that I want him to play.

1) Mount Whitney in “I Stood Tall: The Musical”
2) Doug from the cartoon show of the same title
3) James Franco in “The James Franco Story”
4) Susan B. Anthony in “I Played With Fire”
5) Pete Townshend’s roadie in “The Quiet Life of Innocence”

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The program director of the Olympia Film Society, Rob is also a former San Diego Film Critics Society member. He has written for The East County Californian, The Alpine Sun, The East County Herald, The San Diego Entertainer, and the San Diego Reader. When he isn't curating a film festival, he is drinking rosé out of a plastic cup in Seattle or getting tattoos from Jenn Champion.